It's not exactly uncommon to hear that thermostat settings can cause trouble. “Thermostat Wars” are a very real thing, and people in the same household or workplace have been known to feud over their preferred indoor temperatures pretty much since thermostats first arrived on the scene.
Still, that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the ways thermostats can influence and reflect our behavior. Let’s take a look at a couple of ways your thermostat settings can tell a bit about you as a person.
Your Optimal Setting Reflects How You Were Brought Up
Did you know that you have a “thermal baseline?” It’s the thermostat setting that you genuinely feel that you’re most comfortable with, and there’s far more to it than just randomly-acquired personal preference.
According to one study, it comes from your childhood, and the optimal thermostat settings you learned back then are still sneakily influencing your behavior today.
Yes, the settings you learned to know as “optimal” when you were a child eventually became an integral part of your temperature regulation behavior. In a nutshell, people who grew up in a situation where they had to wear a sweater indoors are likely to prefer similar low-temperature settings as adults. On the other hand, those who grew accustomed to more tropical settings learned to enjoy warmer indoor temperatures, and insist on thermostat settings that reflect this. It’s not just your experiences in your childhood home, either. The preferred settings in your friends’ and neighbors’ homes have all shaped up your ideas about thermostat use — so stealthily that you may not have even noticed it.
Amazingly, this implies that the Thermostat Wars are apparently multigenerational, and your stance in them says something about where and how you grew up. Of course, there are exceptions to the rule, too. If you didn’t feel all that connected to the community growing up, you might be a complete rogue with thermostat settings.
Optimal Thermostat Settings May Also Stress You Out
Settling on a comfortable setting is good for your well-being, whereas home that are too hot or too cold can become actual health risks. However, even a person’s preferred temperature can become a source of inner turmoil. Two
Public Health Wales surveys from 2022 and 2023 discovered that the participants’ stress levels spiked for months before the cold period arrived, because they were concerned about the cost of heating. Due to these worries, they ended up keeping their home colder than was comfortable.
Unfortunately, creative thermostat tweaking may not even be a particularly effective energy-saving strategy.
According to a study from the Georgia Institute of Technology and Carnegie Mellon University, altering thermostat settings manually is actually the less cost-effective option in the long run. Many people either don’t have access to smart thermostats, are set in their habits, or are simply wary of the cost of comfortable thermostat settings. This leads them to either settle on one thermostat setting or change it manually according to the season, which generally leads to less comfort
and
more energy costs.
Since thermostat use and human behavior are so interconnected,
it has been suggested that the energy consumption issues could be treated with better access to smart thermostats and more effective thermostat management education. Still, even if you take away the cost factor, everyone who’s fought a family member or a colleague over thermostat settings knows that attitudes can be hard to change when it comes to this particular subject.
Meaning it’s best for both your stress levels and bank account to plan for settings that everyone can live with, because you can’t change what people grew up with their entire childhood.
